The lead singer of The Black Dahlia Murder just died, Trever Strnad. While not my favorite band, I always really loved all their stuff and his overall personality. For some reason, that one hit me harder than some of the other ones. He’s also only a year older than me, so that made it a bit weird, too.
Not a musician and possibly OT but an artist on and off the court. Kobe Bryant got me.
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Dead musicians with good moustaches.
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…frank tovey…aka…fad gadget…
saw him in his late days one last time live…he was in his mid fourties…and was still rockin a great and weird performance…as always…a few weeks later, i heard the bad news…
could not believe it, since he was so overagile and full on alive for real, when i saw that show…
his track…collapsing new people…made mostly out of a set of clank and clonk metallic samples, neubauten once had recorded with gareth jones, same which made depeche modes “people are people” and “master and servant” that avantgarde meets mainstream pop hits later on, yeah, that fad gadget track, changed my life…for real…“back to nature” for real…and another hail to mute…
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Great idea for a topic.
The one that hit me was Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta. I lit a candle for him that night and on the anniversary. I asked myself why his death had such an effect on me and the answer is that he contributed to some of the most influential music in my life. De-Loused and Frances in particular were played non-stop for about a decade and when I wasn’t listening to them I was pulling apart the lyrics with other fans and figuring out their meaning. Ikey backed up the songs with muted aplomb, never smothering a track but providing a warm bed for everything to lie on. His loss was like losing a family member I’d never met, an integral part of a tapestry that would never be the same again.
RIP brother.
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Oh shit! Didn’t know that! Loved that man…
I saw Mars Volta twice and he was the joy embodied, on stage, while all the others were so serious ^^
And what a talent! (like every one on stage).
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I envy you… I saw them once, apparently their final performance before splitting up, massively disappointing it was. Would love to have seen them around 2003-2005.
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Mark Hollis
laughing Stock/Spirit of Eden are masterpieces in honest emotional intensity, i don’t know if any other musician has managed to open themselves up so completely
"Speaking about his decision not to tour and to maintain a private lifestyle at the time, Hollis said: “I choose for my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it, but I can’t go on tour and be a good dad at the same time.”
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I would also say Mark Hollis, with Bowie’s death as a second big shock too.
I discovered Mark’s music and Talk Talk many years later after release, ofc never got to see them or him live, and he had already retired from public life of any kind. In spite of that, his music clicked so hard that he never went away from my consciousness and suddenly knowing about his death was terrible for me.
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The ones I can still remember being shocking at the time… Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, SOPHIE.
And even though I wasn’t around… John Lennon.
As for writers, definitely Hunter S Thompson.
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I was just looking through my CD’s and thought I’d put on Mira Calix’s first album and then stopped for a second to think “why did she pop up a few weeks back?” Christ! 
I guess in some ways these people are never truly gone as they live on forever through their music and the ongoing influence of what they shared. 
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The thing with Norm is, even if it’s bad, it’s good. Possibly even better.
Mitch Hedberg and Norm Macdonald come to mind. Comedians bring so much joy and laughter to the world, so it’s sad to see them go.
For musicians/songwriters it would be Chuck Berry, Sparklehorse, Lee Scratch Perry, and David Berman.
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oh it’ll be great, but my nerves come from seeing a man in visibly poor health and not being able remove myself from that. he looked really gaunt in his last few insta posts, but yes, was still norm.
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It’s impossible to choose from artists overall, but narrowed down to musicians the one that affected me the most (strangely enough) was Adam Yauch. R.I.P. MCA.
After that: Bowie, Cobain, Prince, Florian Schneider, Lee Scratch Perry, Dwayne Goettel, and so many electronic pioneers that we’ve lost recently. But Yauch was unique because I felt that I really knew him, as a person.
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David Foster Wallace, because I was troubled that a person who possessed such a depth of humanity would eventually be brought to that end.
Also, Adam Yauch, DOOM.
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For me it was Zim Ngqawana.
Saw him numerous times live during the 90s.
Sometime during the 2000s saw him again - a small concert in a house, 20 people max. It was one of the truly mind-fuck moments in my life. Him on sax and another guy on piano. Completely acoustic.
He explained that they hadn’t rehearsed a single note, but they spent the week living together in the house, talking and getting to know each other. They then did a 60-90 minute long improvisation. The type of thing that if I listened casually at home or wherever, I probably wouldn’t last 5 minutes. But in the moment, in that intimate environment, you just surrender yourself, disengage your brain and let it wash over you.
After it finished, as I stepped out the door I looked into the most beautiful sunset, and right at that moment a lion roared loudly (there’s a lion park adjacent, a short way outside Johannesburg), and my mind just went 
.
Not too long before his death, I read a sad story that vandals broke into his rehearsal room (where he also tutored and mentored up and coming musicians) and completely destroyed everything, including a grand piano. He was absolutely devastated. He died way too early.
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Beautiful story.
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I was just getting more interested in music just after Kurt Cobain died. MTV was still playing music, and they were running Nirvana videos nonstop. I didn’t have older siblings or anyone to share music with me, so seeing a band like that blew my mind.
It doesn’t seem it anymore, but for me they were so different from everything else on mainstream radio, especially when everyone I knew was listening to hip hop, and it made a big impression on me.
At the time I was also not in a great place even at that young age, and thinking about death and music and everything that was happening around that time, for me, that was sort of the gateway towards building a strong connection to music in general.
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I felt very, very sad about the death of Ty, a hip hop emcee and producer from the UK. He died aged 47 during the fairly early days of the pandemic in 2020. There was obviously so much going on in the world which added to the emotions, but his first album was kinda important to me (and part of a lot of musical discovery in general) in my early twenties so it just really hit me.
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